The man who created the single most iconic image of US marines died this week. Harold Evans celebrates his picture . . . and what it says to us today
It took Joe Rosenthal of the Associated Press four hundredths of a second to take a picture that will outlive us all: his photograph of six US marines raising the Stars and Stripes on top of Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima on the morning of February 23rd, 1945. Rosenthal died this week at the age of 94, and amid the tributes to his memory there are reflections that the iconic nature of the gallantry exemplified in his picture is no longer a valid image of the US marines. How does the valour on Mount Suribachi survive the stains of Abu Ghraib and murder and rape in Iraq?
That picture, with its drama of unresolved action and the anonymity of the men, with no faces visible, still illuminates a larger truth. The six men (only five are visible) represent the mass, doing their duty, risking their lives and not seeking fame (still less notoriety).
We know the names and faces of those who committed the crimes in Iraq, as we know those of the men at My Lai. They represent the few who dishonour their service and their country. And why do we know about them? Because the US military has prosecuted them, dishonourably discharged them and sent them to jail.
We know the names because even if the military were to neglect its sworn duty, there is a free press and an independent judiciary, vigilant for any breach of the constitution and reputation.
The American military will assuredly seek convictions in any other cases that come to light in a very bitter war where ordinary men, who thought they would be greeted as liberators, are blown up and gunned down by the enemies of freedom in Iraq.
The prosecutions dramatise awful crimes. But the very fact of their exposure and punishment represents the ideals of the US military, just as the videos glorifying beheadings and torture and random murder by suicide bombers represent the ideals of the enemy.
Three of the six men in Rosenthal's picture were killed in action, three of the 6,831 Americans who died on the island.
The flag is not quite raised in the picture. That is a symbol, too, of the unresolved war in Iraq. Soon 3,000 Americans (and thousands more innocent Iraqis) will have paid with their lives for the catastrophic blunders of the Bush administration, notably Donald Rumsfeld, whose obstinacy has betrayed the hope of swiftly bringing peace and freedom.
When I look again at Rosenthal's picture, I think of the legless soldier I met in Chicago recently who was as proud of his service as he was ashamed and angry at the violators of his code. I think of a letter from a neighbour, a student schoolteacher who gave up his job and joined the army out of the sense that he could not explain history without ever seeing anything outside the US.
He is 29 now, and a US army sergeant in Baghdad. Call it naive if you like, but recognise the sincerity in his words.
"Addressing those of you who do not understand why America is in Iraq or what we are dying for, I have this to say to you: What is a vote worth to you? What is having a voice and being able to use it to you? It should be worth your life. I know that freedom for these people is far more valuable than my life.
"I know that human beings are meant to be free of oppression. I know, like the men who founded our nation, that liberty is never given: it is earned. The Iraqis are on their way. They are earning their freedom through blood, and we are standing the line with them. We have lost many now.
"I choose to believe their loss is not in vain. They died so these people could forge a nation in which they will have a voice. The irony is that that voice may beat to a far different drum than our own in the future.
"But that fact is inconsequential to me; it is the fact that they can choose their own destiny." - (Guardian service)
Harold Evans is the author of Pictures on a Page (Heinemann, London, 1978) and The American Century (Jonathan Cape, London, 1998) and is a former editor of the Times and Sunday Times